Panoramas (Hi-res)

The view from our tent in Denali National Park Alaska. This brief view of Denali was the best that we had on our 4-day backpack. The mountain is frequently covered in cloud and this summer was particularly cloudy and rainy in Alaska. Panoramas are not well suited to viewing on Flickr, so I've provided a link to my website where you can zoom in on a full resolution version (16074 x 4108) of the photograph...www.marcshandro.com/panoramas/Denali_Dawn.htm..Notes: What gear to take and how to...more »

The view from our tent in Denali National Park Alaska. This brief view of Denali was the best that we had on our 4-day backpack. The mountain is frequently covered in cloud and this summer was particularly cloudy and rainy in Alaska. Panoramas are not well suited to viewing on Flickr, so I've provided a link to my website where you can zoom in on a full resolution version (16074 x 4108) of the photograph...www.marcshandro.com/panoramas/Denali_Dawn.htm..Notes: What gear to take and how to carry it on a 4-day backpack is a topic of endless fascination it seems for photographers. Thanks to Debbie for carrying the tent this time, I decided to go a bit heavier on this trip. Here's the photo gear I brought: D300, 18-200mm, 12-24mm, 200-400mm (heavy!), velbon carbon-fiber tripod, Really Right Stuff Omni-Pivot Package panormic head, ML-3 transmitter/reciever (ie. cable release), Jobo Gigavu Pro (120Gb), 3 charged batteries and 8Gb & 4Gb CF cards. To keep the camera handy while hiking with the pack on I've found that my Eagle Creek fanny pack worn in the front provides quick and easy access. The protection for the camera isn't stellar, but the ruggedness of the Nikon body & lenses hasn't produced any problems for me so far. This was the heaviest I've ever gone backpacking and it was good that we didn't have large distances or elevations to cover. The hardest day was probably just a few kilometers and maybe 400 meters of elevation, but the spongey tussocky tundra is a lot more tiring than hiking on established trails -- and much more enjoyable!..For this photograph, I used matrix metering and checked the the readings across the planned range of the image. I made a mental note of the lowest and highest shutter speeds selected by the camera for my f8.0 aperture I selected. Since the dynamic range in this case wasn't too extreme, I knew I could get reasonable results without having to think of HDR and taking multiple exposures for each of the seven images in this panorama. I th« less